Sermon for the Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Sunday, October 16, 2022.
If you watch a boulder fall from a cliff of stone into a stream, it might seem that the small stream is no match for the strength of the rock, its weight, and its sharp edges. But the water will continue to wash over and wash by the boulder and over time it will round the sharp edges and wear down the boulder. The small stream seems to be nothing in comparison to the strength of the rock but even the stone cannot withstand the persistent passage of water in even a small stream.
How easy it is to give up! Surely Jacob knew he was no match for the Lord and yet he wrestled with the mysterious stranger even with the pain of a hip out of joint. Would you have kept going or given up? We live in an age in which pain is always the enemy. Look at the opioid crisis or scan the number of painkillers in the drug store or count up the number of pain management clinics in town. They used to say when the going gets tough, the tough get going. But the reality is that we give up when we face resistance or when it hurts to continue.
St. Paul warns the young pastor Timothy to keep on preaching whether people welcome his message or not, in spite of their itching ears and temptation to turn away from the truth. The old apostle tells young Timothy to endure suffering and keep on fulfilling the ministry committed to him. It may surprise the pastor that anyone shows up on Sunday morning but it ought to surprise you that any pastor shows up. Great are the temptations to give it up when people would rather listen to the TV preachers who tell them what they want to hear. Or the minds that prefer the latest meme on Facebook or cute video on YouTube or funny thing on Tik Tok to the hard words of Jesus. How hard it is for pastors to preach to empty pews and to people who do not want to listen. The call of the apostle is to preach faithfully God’s Word – when people welcome it or when they reject it.
And then Jesus speaks of prayer with a story that begs us not to lose heart but to persist in our conversations with God – even when it seems God is not listening or will not give us what we want. We would love to pray if we could count on God to give us what we pray for. Window shopping is great but it is better if you have money in your pocket and you are going to come home with something. So it is with prayer. So many of our prayers are like window shopping. We end up empty handed. Either God is not listening or God does not want us to have the desire of our hearts or God seems to be playing a joke on us that we do not get.
But it is no joke. Jesus is dead serious. Will He find faith on earth when the Son of Man comes in His glory? I will admit it does not look good. Churches have exchanged the Gospel of Jesus crucified and risen for a quick path to getting what we want from life, from our spouse, from our children, from our jobs, and from the stranger on the street. Pastors have done a great job altering the Gospel so that it has no power to offend us and approves of our desires – whatever they may be. But still the churches are empty and when a pandemic comes, too many do not miss it at all.
If it would depend upon us, there would be hope. But our hope is not built upon us or our wills or our intentions. It is built upon Christ, the power of His cross to cancel sin and the power of His resurrection to end the reign of death. Christ has done the heavy lifting. And all that His labor of obedience unto death on a cross has done, now has been given to us freely as a gift. His righteousness we wear by baptism, His Gospel lives in us by the power of His Spirit sent to us, and His life is nourished in us by the food we do not provide but He gives – His flesh in bread and His blood in wine.
What God has called us to is a faith that does give up on the promise written in the Word in the blood of Jesus and the endurance that will not surrender this promise no matter what comes our way. To us it seems a terrible burden. To control our itching ears and focus upon the Word of the Lord seems more than we can do. To rein in the desire of our hearts in the face of temptation, seems too hard to do. To hold on when lives come crashing down, when the world’s fragile foundations are exposed, and when our own lives seem tenuous is a heavy burden. At least it would be if the Lord were not on our side, if He did not provide for the rescue of absolution to reclaim us from our sin, and if He did not remind us continually of all that He has done that we might be His own and live under Him now and forever.
That is why we are here today and every Sunday. We are the widows crying out to the Lord for mercy. We are Jacob wrestling with God to hold onto His promise even when it hurts. We are Timothy clinging to the Word that is not popular or welcome but it is the only Word that has eternal life. We are the people whom the Lord has called to be His own, watched in the blood of the Lamb, and set apart to be His own possession. We are also the people who daily and on Sundays cry out to the Lord to remember us, remember what He has done to save us, remember the mercy He has promised us, and remember what we need to endure in faith.
The truth is that we have made a stinking mess of the Church. Worship and prayer are low priorities in the urgencies of this life. The support of the work of God is never as urgent as our wants. The pews are empty and most of us would rather mind our own business than call the lapsed to account. We cringe at the call to repent and wonder when it will be worth while to belong to the household of faith. Will the Son of Man find faith when He comes again? Our mess indicates that is pretty iffy. But thanks be to God what Jesus has done and continues to do on our behalf. He will never let go of us, He will forgive our sins, He will restore us when we fall, He will seek us out when we wander, and He will give us strength for all that we must endure. But endure we must.
There is only one thing you can count on in pain, only one Word that gives you life, and only God who hears and answers prayers. My brothers and sisters in Christ, persist in Him. Endure in faith. Do not give up. Do not lose hope. Do not surrender to your fears. Do not abandon the Lord or His House. Do not let your itching ears make you deaf to our Good Shepherd’s voice. Do not let the desires of your heart rule over you. You belong to the Lord. You were bought with a price. You are not your own. You are His. You are His now no matter how hard it gets to be His child and live in this world so unfriendly to Christ. You are His when He comes in His glory. Fulfill your calling as the children of God. And your pastors will endeavor to fulfill their ministry on your behalf. Even as together we count not on us but upon Christ, upon the power of His cross to cancel sin and upon the power of His resurrection to raise us to everlasting life. In the holy name of Jesus. Amen.
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